I think there is a connection.
Returning veterans encounter VA mental health meltdown
Philip Northcutt, 38, a fellow Marine, saw intense combat in Iraq in 2004 and was wounded. He was diagnosed with PTSD in the field, but he says he was merely given sleeping pills and an anti-depressant and told to keep fighting. When he came home, he struggled to adjust, spending time in jail and becoming homeless before he started receiving disability benefits more than four years later.
According to Dr. Peter Breggin who has been studying, researching and reporting on the dangers of mind drugs since the early 1990s, many of these new drugs cause what they say they are preventing:
Psychiatric Drug Adverse Reactions (Side Effects) and Medication Spellbinding
The majority of Dr. Breggin's books focus on harmful medication effects on the brain, mind and behavior. Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (2008) is the most up-to-date and thorough presentation of his overall views on the dangers associated with psychiatric medication. It describes how the supposed therapeutic effects of psychiatric drugs are in fact the result of drug-induced mental disabilities. The following very abbreviated summary should not substitute for the more thorough explanations in Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry (2008):
• Antidepressants cause emotional anesthesia and numbing or sometimes euphoria, providing a fleeting, artificial relief from emotional suffering.
• Neuroleptic or antipsychotic drugs disrupt frontal lobe function, causing a chemical lobotomy with apathy and indifference, making emotionally distressed people more submissive and less able to feel.
• Mood stabilizers slow down overall brain function, dampening emotions and vitality.
• Benzodiazepines suppress overall brain function, sedating the individual, with temporary relief of tension or anxiety at the cost of reduced mental function.
• Stimulants blunt spontaneity and enforce obsessive behaviors in children, making them less energetic, less social, less creative and more obedient.
The individual taking the drugs or the doctor, family and classroom teacher can mistakenly interpret these effects as an improvement when they reflect dysfunction of the brain and mind. As an egregious example, millions of school children are prescribed these drugs because schools find them easer to deal with when their spontaneity is impaired and when they become more compulsively obedient.
In the long run, all psychiatric drugs tend to disrupt the normal processes of feeling and thinking, rendering the individual less able to deal effectively with personal problems and with life’s challenges. They worsen the individual’s overall mental condition and produce potentially irreversible harm to the brain.
Most medical and psychiatrist doctors never equate a side effect or new symptom with the medication a patient is already taking. Instead they treat a new symptom or side effect as an onset of a new medical issue and prescribe another pill or increase the dosage of medication the patient is already taking, especially in the mental health field.
Medication Madness - The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases
of Violence, Suicide and Murder
by Peter Breggin, M.D.
Many categories of psychiatric drugs can cause potentially horrendous reactions.
Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, Xanax, lithium, Zyprexa and other psychiatric medications may spellbind patients into believing they are improved when too often they are becoming worse. Psychiatric drugs drive some people into psychosis, mania, depression, suicide, agitation, compulsive violence and loss of self-control without the individuals realizing that their medications have deformed their way of thinking and feeling.
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Medications for everything from depression and anxiety to ADHD and insomnia are being prescribed in alarming numbers across the country, but the “cure” is often worse than the original problem.Medication Madness is a fascinating, frightening, and dramatic look at the role that psychiatric medications have played in fifty cases of suicide, murder, and other violent, criminal, and bizarre behaviors.
As a psychiatrist who believes in holding people responsible for their conduct, the weight of scientific evidence and years of clinical experience eventually convinced Dr. Breggin that psychiatric drugs frequently cause individuals to lose their judgment and their ability to control their emotions and actions. Medication Madness raises and examines the issues surrounding personal responsibility when behavior seems driven by drug-induced adverse reactions and intoxication.
Dr. Peter Breggin has been before several congress committees reporting his concerns in matters of the FDA's poor accountability in honest disclosure about the dangers of many new drugs Big Pharma keeps putting on the market.
Dr. Peter Breggin's Testimony at Veterans Affairs Committee On "Antidepressant-Induced Suicide, Violence and Mania: Implications for the Military"
The Truth About Veteran Suicides
Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.
We don't even know the real stats on the number of Veteran suicides. We don't know the truth about a lot of things especially when it comes to control of the media and information that government and some corporations that they KNOW would disturb us, anger us or destroy us.
I see a connection to the increase of Veteran suicides and the Big Pharma bad drugs.